Is Grand Theft Auto V the most relevant story about torture since Zero Dark Thirty?

The following article is about a mission in Grand Theft Auto V called “By the Book”. It contains spoilers about the game up to that point, but not beyond.

The root is still hanging on right at the gumline. I pull with the pliers while Mr. K screams and gurgles. Am I supposed to pull the tooth straight out, or just keeping yanking it side to side? I shouldn’t have hidden my eyes during this part of Marathon Man. Ah, I see my problem. The controls indicate that I needed to apply a circular motion, like trying to loosen a fence post.

Then, a comment behind me: “Eww.”

It’s my roommate. He has walked into the living room on the way to the kitchen, and there I am, with a pair of pliers plunged into some screaming guy’s bloody mouth, yanking the tooth back and forth. Well, not me, but Trevor, who I’m controlling. Torture by proxy. My official representative is torturing someone while I look on, pressing the buttons to let him do this, and suddenly someone is looking at me. Why does this feel strangely familiar?

After the jump, Rockstar is talking to us, America

As soon as By the Book begins, it establishes itself as something new, different, and gross. Trevor is squatting behind a dumpster, taking a shit. By the sound design, it is a particularly smelly shit. When Michael sees him and asks what he was doing, Trevor is unashamed. Is this prologue to the mission related to the actual mission? Is there a metaphor here? Or is Rockstar just a bunch of dudes who think shitting behind a dumpster is funny and a torture scene will get guys like me to write long articles?

During By the Book, you have four methods to torture a man identified only as Mr. K. You can administer a shock through battery clamps attached to his nipples, you can strike him with an enormous plumber’s wrench, you can pull out a tooth with pliers, or you can waterboard him. What makes this mission so uncomfortable in a game from a genre in which you’ve brutalized lots of people? Why do you wince when Trevor swings the wrench into Mr. K’s knee, but you giggled when your character in Saints Row IV did the same thing to a random pedestrian? Both clearly show the impact of the blow. Both victims are helpless. Both instances are violence against innocents. In fact, the one where you wince at least offers the implication that the victim could be guilty of some atrocity, or at least colluding with terrorists who committed some atrocity.

One big difference is that the victim in one case ragdolls away, but the victim in the other case cries and begs for mercy. There’s also the matter of tone. Saints Row IV is a cartoon, but Grand Theft Auto V, for all it’s goofy satire, isn’t joking right now. Another big difference is that By the Book is politically relevant to your country. I’m talking to folks in the US right now. Also, Poland, Romania, Pakistan, Morocco, and Egypt. You guys get to sit in the section marked “extraordinary rendition” over there on the right.

The Houser brothers, whose creative fingerprints are all over Rockstar’s quintessentially American games, are British. Their country paid the price for cozying up to the neoconservative response to 9/11. The costs ranged from the 52 dead in the 7/7 bombings to Tony Blair’s fall from grace to an intelligence community cowed by its failings. Rockstar North is in Scotland, a country whose main claim to fame on the global stage is that it’s under the flight path of Pan Am Flight 103. These are countries with a keen interest in what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. These are countries intimately familiar with the FBI and CIA, for better and worse. In By the Book, the interrogation is conducted by the CIA. The resulting field work is conducted by the FBI. Almost. In both cases, your character is the layer between the agency and its victim. Trevor performs the actual torture on the subject. Michael pulls the actual trigger on the target. You are pawns, doing what you’re told, whether you approve or not, whether you enjoy it or not. You are doing it because you’ve done it before. The animation of Trevor choosing a method of torture indicates he knows exactly what each of these does and how to use it. It’s the same type of animation as a character selecting a weapon from the wall at Ammu Nation. It’s how you select a pair of socks from a dresser drawer every morning.

Trevor’s torture leaves marks. If you use the car battery and clamps, Mr. K’s chest is burned bright red. Depending on where you hit him with the wrench, his pants will be bloodstained. If you pull his tooth, his mouth is bloodied and his speech is slurred. Although if you waterboard him, he just gets wet. Waterboarding is chilling for how harmless it seems to someone who hasn’t been waterboarded. “It’s torture,” Mr. K insists as you hold the right trigger to flip his chair back. He’s been through this before. You’re not his first torturer today. “It shouldn’t be legal!” he cries as you put the rag over his face. Push up on the left stick to pour the water. Intellectually, I know how it works; it creates the sensation of drowning. But I still don’t understand the effectiveness. I’m one of those guys who’s all, “I’ve put a wet washcloth on my face while taking a bath and I didn’t freak out…” One of the most admirable things Christopher Hitchens did was see for himself whether waterboarding was terrible. I’m just going to take his and everyone else’s word for it.

While Trevor tortures Mr. K, the mission cuts to Michael training a sniper scope on a houseful of people. In Chris Hecker’s upcoming two-player mini-game, Spy Party, one player is a sniper trying to pick out a target at a cocktail party. The sniper observes details such as how party goers sip their drinks. This is how he determines who he will shoot. There’s no context for this. That’s just the gameplay. But in By the Book, Michael and FBI Agent Dave are fed intel directly from the interrogation, giving them increasingly specific details about the target, who must be identified through a sniper scope.

The first bit of information is that the target is Azerbaijani. Do you even know that Azerbaijan isn’t a place in World of Warcraft? Could you tell an Azerbaijani from a Kurd or a Turk or an Albanian? Dave and Michael certainly can’t. I know I can’t. My only frame of reference for Azerbaijan is that the Armenians used them as whipping boys in the early 90s. The Armenians! Imagine getting your ass kicked by Armenia. But I wouldn’t know an Azerbaijani from an Armenian without poring over their respective passports. How am I going to tell that through a sniper scope? If you’ve seen the denizen of one former Soviet republic, you’ve seen them all, amirite? Hashtag uglyamerican.

Fortunately, the interrogation yields more information, even if it’s obvious the victim is inventing details to satisfy his torturers. The first address he gives is wrong. How can anything come of this? Is he just going to invent another address? But when the CIA suggests a name, Mr. K readily admits to knowing that person. He’d installed a sound system at that person’s house! There’s a party there today! Maybe that’s what they want to know! Maybe that’s behind the six weeks of suffering he’s endured! Maybe the end is near! You can see the synapses firing behind his eyes as his brain clutches at hope.

So you have a location, which is conveniently a Malibu house, all windows and balconies, with about fifteen people milling about. Now to narrow it down to a specific target. The target is average height, average build, average age, Mr. K offers desperately. The interrogators need more. He has a beard, Mr. K offers. Several people at the party who could be Azerbaijani have beards. What kind of beard? A big beard, the torture victim offers after another round of brutality. Ah, the sort of beard a terrorist would grow. But they/you still need more information, so more torture happens. The target smokes cigarettes. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. It’s not easy to find smokers in Los Angeles, but if you’re going to find someone smoking, a hipster party in Malibu is a good place to look. The FBI agent needs still more specific information. More torture. The target is left handed. That’s it! You now have a target. A left handed smoker with a beard. Who’s Azerbaijani, but whatever. You’ve got enough information to kill someone. The torture victim — or interrogation subject, if you prefer — was plucked out of a skyscraper based on what must have been reliable intel, maybe from someone tortured up the intel stream. Of course he’d know who to shoot.

I don’t believe the men interrogated by the US government, whether by the CIA or at the hands of Eastern European or Egyptian officials, were chosen at random. I don’t believe the men held at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib were simply swept up like so many fish in a broad trawling net. I believe the men and women who captured and imprisoned them had mostly good reasons. I therefore believe that some of them are very bad people. And I even accept that some of them might be innocent of significant wrongdoing. Although it’s unfortunate, I accept that some of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am willing to accept the collateral damage of the occasional Afghan taxi driver or travelling Moroccan when it comes to dismantling terrorist networks, just as I am willing to accept that a Predator drone strike might kill all the family members in a strike against an al Qaeda safehouse. I am — and I admit this without shame — a realist.

But what I am not willing to accept is that the victims of interrogation and the targets of drone strikes and the men held indefinitely in extralegal facilities aren’t there by a carefully established due process. The insight of By the Book is that it recreates the absurd lack of due process in a chain of events that goes from gathering intel with enhanced interrogation to using that intel to determine a target to actually executing that target. It is a grotesque bit of satire about a failed and disavowed American policy, much like Dr. Strangelove is a commentary on the Cold War, Apocalypse Now is a commentary on Vietnam, and In the Loop is a commentary on the invasion of Iraq. These are all important chapters in our national identity, and they all deserve the close examination that comes with satire, black humor, and even ridicule.

Zero Dark Thirty is an examination of the same topic as By the Book, but with an important difference. Kathryn Bigelow’s and Mark Boal’s movie carefully skirts editorial opinion. One of the things I deeply appreciate about Zero Dark Thirty’s narrative arc from 9/11 to the cathartic killing of Osama bin Laden is that it leaves me to examine how I feel. It does not tell me how to feel. It does not exaggerate torture. It doesn’t even demonize the torturers. It is a dispassionate procedural that leaves viewers to decide what they feel. Discussions about Zero Dark Thirty say more about the people having the discussion than the movie. That’s its genius.

Something you might discover while watching the movie, if you didn’t know it already, is the uncomfortable reality that retribution is arguably better than having never been wronged. The term “satisfaction” implies as much. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega is talking about someone having keyed his car. “Boy, I wish I could’ve caught him doing it,” he says. “I’d have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It would have been worth him doing it just so I could have caught him doing it.”

I don’t apply that reasoning to 9/11, of course. But I do apply it to the killing of Osama bin Laden. If he’d been killed by Navy SEALs after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen back in 2000, I wouldn’t have felt that weird heady concoction of emotions when he was killed by Navy SEALs after 9/11. I wouldn’t have gotten the same buzz. I could have easily remained above that ineluctable sense of satisfaction — the satisfaction of duels of honor and legal courts and avenging angels — that came from a man’s death. The bombing of the Cole was easy to process and keep in a little emotional box, because servicemen dying in the line of duty is as venerable and familiar as the concept of duty. But the secret shame I confront about myself and the thrill I felt when bin Laden was killed, the thrill I relive at the conclusion of Zero Dark Thirty, is that the thrill wouldn’t exist without 9/11, and I don’t dislike the thrill for the event that caused it. Revenge does weird things to people. Zero Dark Thirty holds up that weird thing for you to consider, and it folds into the weird compartments of that emotional box the idea of torture. Time was you would immediately know the answer if you were asked if torture is a bad thing. Now you pause before answering.

But unlike Zero Dark Thirty, By the Book has no desire to remain detached. It is as opinionated as Kubrick, Coppola, and Iannucci. It is an editorial and not a document. It is a fully processed, fully articulated opinion on torture and remote assassination. It pulls no punches and brooks no ambiguity. It even presses into service a psychotic to lucidly articulate an opinion on what you’ve just seen. No, not seen. Committed. You did that. You made Trevor do that. You could have quit out of the mission and spent the rest of Grand Theft Auto V doing races and scavenger hunts. You could have taken a stand. When you booted up the game, you never had the luxury of opting out of disturbing scenes, Activision style. You didn’t get a disclaimer about multicultural awareness when the game started, Ubisoft style. So here’s where you can react to the game veering outside your comfort zone. Here is the point Rockstar wants to make with your direct assistance. Now that you’ve mowed down so many bystanders with cars and guns, what do a few more moments of brutality matter?

So you extracted that tooth, shattered that knee, clamped those jumper cables onto that man’s nipples and flipped that switch. You made sure he was in pain and not simply killed. You stabbed him in the heart with an adrenaline syringe to make sure he didn’t die. You shot the bearded, left-handed, smoking man who may or may not have been from Azerbaijan. And now the mission is over and you’ve been instructed to basically shoot the broken sobbing Mr. K and dump his body in the LA river. If this mission were No Russian from Modern Warfare 2, that’s how it would play out.

Evil is a convenient theological construct that serves a purpose every bit as valuable as love, honor, patriotism, duty, respect, and so forth. But it can only offer you so much insight into why people do what they do. British director Simon Rumley’s Red, White, and Blue is a grim slice of Texas gothic about three decent people doing utterly reprehensible things to each other. It’s a slacker mumblecore movie that spins out of control into the grotesque excess of a Jacobean tragedy. Richard Linklater meets Titus Andronicus. But it’s difficult to watch because it demands that you understand why the characters do these reprehensible things. It carefully and relentlessly unfolds the humane motivations behind inhumane deeds. The most psychotic of the three characters, who incidentally claims he’s a torturer for the CIA, is also the most emotionally honest, the most level-headed, the calmest. It’s an unforgettable performance by Noah Taylor, fiercely hollow-eyed and scraggly, with the duct tape dangling from his belt as ominously as any assassin’s pistols.

Similarly, it’s the madman in Grand Theft Auto V who most clearly explains what’s just happened in By the Book. If you want to understand what Rockstar is doing here, you cannot gloss over Trevor’s explanation at the end of the mission. Trevor’s motivation for performing the torture is two-fold. First, he’s psychotic, so he enjoys torture. He says as much, but you already knew he was sadistic from the rest of the game.

But he further explains an additional motivation. Instead of shooting Mr. K and dumping his body in the LA river as per the instructions from the CIA, Trevor instead drives him to the airport, coldly ignoring Mr. K’s plea to go to a hospital, or to see his family again. Instead, Trevor is exiling Mr. K from his country, their country, my country, separating Mr. K from his family, explaining to him that life as he knows it is over. On the drive to the airport, Trevor explains his second and more relevant motivation. He explains that he knows torture doesn’t work. He knows the information he got from Mr. K is useless for anything but placating the CIA. He wants Mr. K to leave the United States and tell the rest of the world what happened here. He brutalizes and then saves Mr. K to expose a government policy. Trevor might be psychotic enough to enjoy torturing people, but he’s also smart enough to know that his government should be better than he is.

That is the crux of the issue. Even if torture works — it doesn’t, but even if it did — my country should be above it. Whether the objection is moral or practical doesn’t matter to the substance of the objection. Is it wrong because it’s wrong, or is it wrong because it’s not effective? Whatever the case, it’s wrong. And now Mr. K is an anti-torture evangelist/martyr, created by Trevor and sent out into the world.

In Modern Warfare 2’s No Russian level, you participated in the massacre of civilians during a terrorist attack on an airport. It was shocking and crass, but also as pointless as someone taking a smelly shit in the middle of the road and then pointing at it while people drive by. But By the Book, which is also shocking and crass, has a point. It has a reason for taking us outside our comfort zone. This is something your country — you, me — have done. It is something we must account for. That we squatted behind a dumpster doesn’t mean we didn’t do it, it doesn’t mean that no one saw, it doesn’t mean there are no repercussions because it already stank back there. By the Book points an accusing finger, it calls us out, it calls out our country, it says something very specific to you and me about something very specific we have done. And it situates Grand Theft Auto V someplace few videogames reach, alongside darkly relevant stories like Dr. Strangelove, Apocalypse Now, In the Loop, and Zero Dark Thirty.

Slow clap and whistle, Tom. Incredible read. In fact if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read it again.

gustave154

GTA 5 best game ever thanks to this scene

Seth

My problem with this mission has nothing to do with social, moral, politcal, or humane leanings and reasonings… My problem is that up to this point in the game (and the 10 or so hours after it that I have played) almost every single mission, action, and sidequest are rooted in fun. Whether its literary satire or running guys over with cars, everything is meant to be fun. This scene and the assassination attached are not. Its jarringly immersion breaking, and even had me turning off the system for a while.

I don’t say its in bad taste wholly because of subject matter, I say its in bad taste because it’s tonally out of place.

schurem

I can’t wait to use the thinking in this article in class. I teach philosophy, and this is a fantastic meal for thought for my students (and myself!). They are all abuzz about GTAV and you have thoroughly and elegantly demonstrated how its far more than the shallow entertainment most people view it as. Thanks for this Tom!

Tei

This remind the moral dilemma of Jesse from Breaking Bad. For the production of meth to continue, more people is going to die. Jesse is lied to, trapped, forced to do things, withouth he knowing, and sometimes he knowing it. Theres a manipulative hand that need him, and will do *literal anything* to force him to continue collaborating with producing meth. The USA population disagree with most politics of USA, but theres continue anyway, because the machine can’t stop, the USA empire need a type of politics that most people inside the USA empire would disaprove if they know. This is another reason why secrets are so important and why leakers are so dangerous. The public must not know what is being doing in his name.

Ben

Aaaaw. I didn’t get the poop scene. Mine started with Trevor under a pier with a dude tied up to the pier. Man this article makes me want to watch 24 seasons 1 to 6 again. Netflix take me away !

Mygaffer

Well, for one mission at least. You may want to be careful too, and be ready to justify yourself, because you know if some parent overhears that Mr. Schurem was “showing the kids that violent new video game”, you will be getting harassed over it.

Mercanis

Thanks for the article, Mr. Chick. I’ve never played a Grand Theft Auto game, but this article helps me understand why this franchise gets all the attention it does.

Corrections:
“… your character is the layer between the agency and [its] victim.”
“[I]t does not exaggerate torture.”

CuriousOrange

I just thought it was trying to be controversial, didn’t add anything to the game or character. It was fine, but made me sigh a bit. Other than that scene though, I thought the game was excellent.

DZ

Such a great write up, thumbs up Tom!

It might just be me, I’m ~60% through the story, but I tend to view Trevor as somewhat of a modern day Cynic (I’m capitalizing on purpose) in the sense that he has this Diogenic quality and purpose of putting into light society’s absurdity and corruption through sheer transgression.

I kind of read that scene in that light: far from the usual euphemisms, tiptoeing semantics and dehumanized statistics, he makes torture absurdly close and personal. And I like that he gets me out of my comfort zone doing so.
Because as you said, I’m one of these people who wouldn’t say “no” outright to the use of torture and would say it really depends on the context; which means that there’s somehow a paradigm where it makes sense that a civilized country would inflict that to individuals (on the giving and receiving end). Well, I’m glad this abusive, yet principled, meth dealing entrepreneur slash psycho and his enjoyment of it shoved that hypocritical bullshit right into my face.

This won’t change my views on everything overnight obviously but hey, all these naughts spent watching 24 and other security porn didn’t change all my views overnight but they sure helped in the long run. I guess the 10s will be about examining and eventually rebalancing all that.

schurem

Well, I shure aint going to be showing the game itself in the classroom, for the reason you just outlined ;-) But all the kids are playing it anyway. They even offered to buy me the game if that meant I wouldnt have time to prepare their homework lol. So I might as well use their current interest to spark a little thought in their bright young but utterly lazy minds

Mygaffer

I used to date a teacher and knowing how parents can be they would get it in their head that you had showed it even when you only spoke about it.
Still, I am sure it could be a great lesson.

ElGuapo

So now the media has a story about the most brutal, savage, and demented character in the history of the GTA series – even he disagrees with torture as an instrument of intelligence gathering. I think the end of this mission is going Hornady Critical Duty 9MM 135Grain Hollow Point

Nightwish

” I am willing to accept the collateral damage of the occasional Afghan
taxi driver or travelling Moroccan when it comes to dismantling
terrorist networks, just as I am willing to accept that a Predator drone
strike might kill all the family members in a strike against an al
Qaeda safehouse. I am — and I admit this without shame — a realist.”

And so are the terrorists and assorted violated Arabs. Yay for ego-based geopolitics.

Chase Dahl

It’s as if “Spec Ops: The Line” never happened.
Oh wait, it did. Rockstar may crib, but at least they crib from the best.

Alan

Precisely. I’m disgusted by what Tom’s saying there.

Nate

Though I don’t completely agree that it was effective, I do like your insight. I don’t know if I have become desensitized but I felt the torture scene held little impact in an entire game filled with gratuitous supplies of violence. It wasn’t out of place and didn’t make me think twice about what I was doing. I felt worse about killing the guy at the party because there was no guarantee that was him.

Call me stupid, but I just didn’t feel the gravity like a lot of other people did. I think in a couple years, you or someone else will be sensationalizing another “offensive” scene in some new title and labeling the torture scene in GTAV as crass.

http://www.christilton.com Chris Tilton

While I agree with your assessment that “By the Book” certainly has an opinion, I thought what it had to say was just really obvious satire (like the rest of the game). To use your “steaming pile of shit and pointing at it” analogy, I’d say By the Book did just that, but then added “It’s probably not a good idea to shit in the street” as some sort of punchline. How insightful.

Frank V

Man… Good writing….

http://www.1singur.deviantart.com/ Stefan Dumitrache

I want to read it, but I don’t want to spoil the game. Decisions, decisions…

Homeslicer

But don’t you see? That is what makes it so brilliant and so stand out. When you soaked in gore and shit and piss you don’t notice a little more, but introduce something completely different, when you least expect it and bam.. sticks with you forever.

wo0tus

Reading this article won’t spoil the entire game for you, just this one particular mission, and maybe the introduction of a couple side characters.

David

Hmmm… that was actually extremely well written, and I don’t read articles like this, let alone long articles like this. Try to explain to people that there are messages in everything, and they don’t want to hear it; it’s that “comfort zone” thing.. they don’t like being outside it.

Philip Hartman

How do you know torture doesn’t work? You state unequivocally in this article that “torture doesn’t work”, but you are a videogames journalist, so I am curious why you speak so authoritatively about the effectiveness of classified torture techniques, especially when top CIA officials (including Panetta) have said enhanced interrogations actually led to OBL. You wouldn’t be talking out of your ass, would you?

Ouch My Head Said Dionysus

I may be wrong, but I’d think philosophy students are probably old enough not to have their parents mind what media they consume!

Mygaffer

I don’t know why, but I read it as him being a high school teacher. Obviously it is a lot different if he is teaching a college class, not that would keep him 100% safe from any criticism.

Jamie

“I am willing to accept that a Predator drone strike might kill all
the family members in a strike against an al Qaeda safehouse” – what if
it kills all the family members in the house next to the al Qaeda
safehouse?

Very easy for you to “accept” this while sitting safe
in your house with no drone buzzing over your head. The mental stress
caused by constant fear of a drone attack occurring is causing huge
amounts of anxiety and depression among people living in in areas where
they occur.
(http://www.livingunderdrones.org/living-under-drones/)

Apparently
a realist with no idea about reality. You think that torture is the
worst thing that the United States Government does? Hah. Why do you think
that’s bad but it’s okay for the USA to use a secret flying robotic murder
program which kills hundreds of innocents and causes huge mental health problems for those in affected areas?

Logezbro

Agreed. I’ve been finding articles on this scene interesting, but mainly because I don’t understand why it’s causing such a big fuss, especially taking into consideration the entirety of the game. Maybe I’m just desensitized, but there are far worse things in television and film every single day. Sometimes I feel like games writers are taking games too seriously, when at their very core they’re meant to take your mind off of everything serious and just be FUN. I certainly don’t mind games that make you think and question things, but it’s a little weird to me when writers dig into games that I feel aren’t trying to do that in the first place. Yes there was crazy stuff in this game, but at the end of the day I feel it was being GTA for the sake of being GTA, and that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

S.S

Maybe he’s read this book from a former CIA interrogator? Whether or not he’s a video game journalist isn’t really relevant, people often read and research areas outside of their direct line of work.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in high school, but they didn’t offer philosophy classes back then. Maybe things have changed. It’d be neat if they did!

Mygaffer

Some high schools do offer philosophy classes. Mine did.

Steve

Absolutely disgusting you compared this to Dr. Strangelove. It was overt, uninteresting and unintelligent. Trevor literally says “Torture doesn’t work!” The dialogue has all the depth of a 2nd grade school play.

Steve

Former government agents have a .. checkered history. One former FBI agent named John Guandolo for example went crazy and is adament that the Secretary of Defense is a secret Muslim…

Leon Panetta has said torture was used to help get bin Laden. Other former CIA/military officials have suggested it can work. So does common sense.

Look, I don’t claim to know for sure that “torture works.” My gut tells me it works sometimes, and is justified sometimes. What I can’t stand is liberals who feel so strongly about something they don’t fully understand feeling so vindicated that some puerile videogame included an overt, uninteresting torture “satire” like this. GTA dropped the ball, and Tom Chick did too by comparing this to Dr. Fucking Strangelove.

Steve

This is why no one takes philosophy seriously. :) I mean, Tom should not have compared this to Dr. Strangelove. It’s ludicrous. Play the game and you’ll see why. It’s very one dimensional.

zaza

Azerbaijani is Turkic People

Steve

One other thing that really troubles me is that I get the sense liberals and conservatives take “black or white” stances on torture for intellectually dishonest reasons. Liberals say “torture doesn’t work” so that they don’t have to confront the very hard moral questions that arise when you have a detainee who probably would spill the beans if you tortured him. Conservatives say “torture works” so they don’t have to confront the moral problems involved in torturing an innocent.

It’s too bad. There are tough questions to confront here, but if people like Tom are just going to take a bright-line “torture never works!!” position, they won’t get confronted. To be fair, Tom does assume arguendo at the end that torture works, and then says that the U.S. should be “above” torture, but that doesn’t square at all with his ‘realist’ mindset about drone strikes. The piece is all over the place.

tomchick

The realist bit is about collateral damage and how sometime innocent people get swept up in war and the legal system.

In case it’s not clear from the article, I am 100% against my government torturing people, under the guise of enhanced interrogation or any other name. I’m against it mostly because its morally reprehensible, but also because there’s no evidence its an effective way to get information from people. Torture is only effective at getting people to say whatever they think will make the torture stop. As many interrogators will tell you, there are far better ways to get reliable information from people you’ve imprisoned.

As for drone strikes, I’m perfectly fine with them as long as they’re subject to government oversight. I’m satisfied with the Obama administration’s insistence that they’re not just willy nilly firing missiles into people’s homes.

Hope that clears up your perception that the article is “all over the place”. That may be the case, but I have very specific opinions about those particular subjects.

Ducasse

http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/
You should educate yourself on the issue from more independent sources (like Stanford and NYU as in the above link) instead of taking the ruling administration’s word at face value. Drones are wretched and actually totally ineffective tools.

Tom Chick’s not funny.

I found the article disrespectful. I’m from Azerbaijan but I certainly do not look anything like a Kurd, Albanian or even Turk. I am light skinned, have green eyes and brown hair – bet your racist, simplistic mind didn’t expect that. Using immature, ignorant stereotypes like that in your article just reflects your lack of knowledge and experience as a writer; I think you sir should be ashamed. But I don’t fully blame you Mr. Chick, when you’re working for this waste of a domain, shit website, it’s expected that amateur writers such as yourself are gonna pour something out of their ass like this just to get a few teenage kids laughing thus building your self esteem as a human being. Well the jokes not funny for everyone and I think it’s sad you had ruin a half decent article like that…Furthermore, you can go fuck yourself.

Unrein

Ditto. Stopped reading at that point. Keep the fear alive, gotta police the world one brown person at a time!

Steve

But why isn’t torture okay, if it’s “subject to government oversight?” Is it because you think drones kill active threats, while torture is only for investigative purposes? If so, I think you have to confront two problems: first, that investigative purposes can relate to potential active threats, and second, that torture may in fact work as an investigative tool. I don’t think anyone — interrogator or not — has decisively proven that torture is worthless, because “whatever the torturee thinks will make the torture stop” can in some cases be the truth.

I replayed this mission today and was confronted with something that I think was clever on rockstar’s part. When Trevor drops the torture victim at the airport, he does so without giving him a credit card, cash, or anything — it’s clear the torture victim has nowhere to go. He is a clever metaphor for the countless Gitmo detainees that many people think are being treated unfairly — but who also have no realistic place to go.
. “

Steve

Specifically, in your post you write:

“And now Mr. K is an anti-torture evangelist/martyr, created by Trevor and sent out into the world.”

A half naked Muslim-looking man with no money is dropped off at ‘Departures’ at LAX — let’s face it, he’s not getting to the ticket counter, much less ‘out into the world’ on an airplane. If anything, Rockstar is criticizing Trevor’s idealism, and by extension the notion that there is any way to ‘free’ many torture victims in U.S. detention camps, including Gitmo.

Gavin

The poop scene is actually part of the mission, The pier thing is just a switch cutscene.

13penguins

What he was trying to say was that almost nobody knows what an Azerbaijani looks like, and the game was mocking us for being so ignorant of the rest of the world. He was laying his own ignorance bare for us to see, and doing it intentionally to show he was ashamed that he had no idea what an entire cultural group looked like. I still don’t know what an Azerbaijani is supposed to look like.

You can’t respond immediately with outrage and ignore the message he clearly laid bare for us to see. He wasn’t being racist, he was mocking his own ignorance.

Guest

for some reason when I read Turk my mind said Turd… I know it wasn’t a misread, maybe I associated the color of skin to crap, or was it my sub-conscience racism at work, all in all from my studies I know one thing, stereotypes are true, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Also, racism is something we are born with, it’s natural to want to be around other people like yourself, otherwise ghettos and slavery wouldn’t exist. I’m a realist too just like the author, it was a great read. BTW this guy is just mad because he doesn’t like his own kind, dude, don’t be ashamed to be from Azerbaijan, I don’t hate you, I hate you’re entire region so don’t take it personal. GOOMBA!

Guest

What if drones were here in the states and used to kill terrorist domestically, we are after all in a state of war against an idea and not a nation and our service vow is to fight the enemy both at home and a broad. If innocent american families were considered CD would it matter? I can only imagine the stress of knowing drones over head 24/7 would cause a person let alone entire regions

Tom Chick’s not funny

Turks aren’t the colour of turds, you’re thinking of a completely different continent, trying going North a bit. At what point did I send the message that I don’t ‘like my own kind’? I’m not ashamed of anything you illiterate, inept fuck, the whole point of my comment was to defend myself. The world would be a better place without morons like you, for the love of God please don’t reproduce, ever.

I’m talking about the writer being ignorant and unprofessional – then you go on and write a piece of shit paragraph about your thoughts on racism and ghettos. Way to go! The education in this one is merely below average! Goomba!

*I hate your entire region

Tom Chick’s not funny

Could you show me some direct quotations as to where you think Chick is mocking his own ignorance please? I read this article through and I just concluded that he is an immature, ignorant writer, so desperate for attention that he would even pour out a bit of racism in his article.

Taha

Yeah it really does strike me as a comment written from ignorance of never being racially profiled, or having the propsect of being blown up a daily possibility.